Cassie Steps Up

A couple of years ago, a brown-eyed Connecticut teenager named Cassie Ventura snuck up on the country with “Me & U,” a simple, slinky MySpace single that sounded like it could have been played at a high school dance in 1985. The song’s success was propelled by an inexpensive Flashdance-homage video of a lithe, navel-baring Cassie strutting around a mirrored studio in sweats, and the effect was… You know, this is one of those things that if we try to explain it, it will sound moronic. It just worked. “Me & U” shot to the top of the charts. Cassie Ventura became known simply as Cassie.

Skip forward to the present, and along with her last name, Cassie has dropped the ’80s nostalgia and taken a modern turn. She made a memorable, uncredited cameo in Kanye West’s Tokyo-shot, I-don’t-care-how-much-this-costs video for his single “Stronger,” playing a Japanime-styled moll who danced on a platinum staircase that looked like it had been stolen from Dolce and Gabbana’s villa. Now she’s returning with a second album, as yet untitled, in which she enlists an armada of twenty-first-century production talent ranging from Ryan Leslie (who produced “Me & U”) to Swizz Beatz and West. She makes her movie debut this month, starring in Step Up 2 the Streets, the second installment of the dance-off franchise that’s kind of like a hornier version of High School Musical. And in the surest sign her career is taking off, the 20-year-old has endured a predictable bomblet of gossip about how she’s dating her boss, Bad Boy Records president Sean Combs.

A couple of years ago, a brown-eyed Connecticut teenager named Cassie Ventura snuck up on the country with “Me & U,” a simple, slinky MySpace single that sounded like it could have been played at a high school dance in 1985. The song’s success was propelled by an inexpensive Flashdance-homage video of a lithe, navel-baring Cassie strutting around a mirrored studio in sweats, and the effect was… You know, this is one of those things that if we try to explain it, it will sound moronic. It just worked. “Me & U” shot to the top of the charts. Cassie Ventura became known simply as Cassie.

Skip forward to the present, and along with her last name, Cassie has dropped the ’80s nostalgia and taken a modern turn. She made a memorable, uncredited cameo in Kanye West’s Tokyo-shot, I-don’t-care-how-much-this-costs video for his single “Stronger,” playing a Japanime-styled moll who danced on a platinum staircase that looked like it had been stolen from Dolce and Gabbana’s villa. Now she’s returning with a second album, as yet untitled, in which she enlists an armada of twenty-first-century production talent ranging from Ryan Leslie (who produced “Me & U”) to Swizz Beatz and West. She makes her movie debut this month, starring in Step Up 2 the Streets, the second installment of the dance-off franchise that’s kind of like a hornier version of High School Musical. And in the surest sign her career is taking off, the 20-year-old has endured a predictable bomblet of gossip about how she’s dating her boss, Bad Boy Records president Sean Combs.

In person, however, Cassie comes off as more of a sweet teenager than a hip-hop femme fatale. On a frigid late-December afternoon, she walks into New York’s Bar Pitti dressed in the downtown-girl de rigueur of short parka, purple kaffiyeh, and skinny jeans, plus a screaming pair of metallic gold high-tops she bought online. Nursing a cold, she expresses wonderment at how far she’s come from her not-so-distant days of ballet lessons and trips from New London, Connecticut, on the train. “It definitely caught me off guard,” she says of “Me & U” mania. “It was like picking someone up off the street and turning them into a singer. It was kind of crazy, and at first I didn’t understand what it meant. Ecutives were like, ‘Who is this girl?’ and I was just going with it. It was never a reality for me.”

Reality came soon enough as Cassie experienced the inevitable backlash to her comet-like success. There were spotty live performances (“I know I did a bad job”) and a (false) rumor that she’d been dropped by the Bad Boy label. For a while, the jabs bummed her out—“I thought, Wow, people want to tear me down”—but it’s clear the ex-model is getting her confidence back, thanks partly to Kanye, who cut her a track as a quid pro quo for her “Stronger” cameo. “I’m so glad he asked me,” she says of the video. “After so many people counted me out, it was just what I needed. He was like, ‘I really believe in you. I think you’re the next big thing.’ That was a good feeling.”

Of course, Cassie’s return means that tongues will wag again; she rolls her eyes at a recent (and untrue, she says) report that had her shacked up with P. Diddy. “It’s insane—you have hundreds of people texting you, ‘Is this true?’; I’m like, ‘Do you know me?’ People have this image of me—if only they knew who I am.” But as she enters her third decade, a little older and wiser, Cassie knows humans are always going to talk, whether it’s Connecticut or the rest of the ever expanding Cassieverse.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (effective 1/4/2014) and Privacy Policy (effective 1/4/2014). GQ may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Condé Nast.